Marvin Gardens presents Paintings of Horses and Other Things Also, a solo exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based painter Dan Schein.

Dan Schein paints tableaux of primeval landscapes dominated by human desire. These narrative scenes portray the entangled lives of humans, horses, and environments in a temporal frame that fuses the mythic with the contemporary. With echoes of Biblical tales and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, Schein’s works nod to the tradition of painterly allegory, constructing parodic interpretations of historical genre scenes. As the title indicates, most of the works in this exhibition are horse-and-rider images, a motif to be found in painting’s earliest and most formative incarnations. Schein’s equestrians display in their gazes a range of pathos and emotional resonance that seems lost on their bipedal counterparts, poignantly framing humanity’s moral ambiguity.

The scenes are bleak but retain an active luminosity both in composition, through a gestural rendering of form and space, and in character, via Schein’s perverse sense of humor: Poussin filtered through the hand of an expressionist and the eye of a cartoonist. The tableaux carry a tragicomic simultaneity, a Twilight Zone-esque affect in which each individual, alone and unaware, may believe themselves to be the last survivor of a near-future fallout.

Dan Schein was born in South Africa in 1985 and now lives and works in New York City. This is his first solo show with Marvin Gardens. Other notable solo shows include Naked Pictures at Tom Christoffersen Gallery, Copenhagen (2017); Where Do We Dump The Bodies at Mike Weiss Gallery, New York (2016); and Dan Schein: New Paintings at Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo (2013).